I'm married!!!
So, I've been a pretty sporadic poster, and there has been ALOT of back-and-forth about what exactly we were going to do for our wedding. Originally, we were going to have the big traditional family wedding, until one day we stopped, looked at each other, and asked 'why???'. After lots of thought and re-planning, on February 6th, 2008, we had our dream wedding. It was simply the best day of my life!!! For details, gratuitous amount of pictures, and a mini rant about why eloping is awesome, click the cut!!!
We were married at the Excellence Riviera Resort and Spa in Cancun, Mexico. It's 5 star and has won a ton of awards this year (we stayed for 8 days and 7 nights)... we spent MANY hours on tripadvisor picking the resort, and I have to say we made the right decision. It was insanely luxurious, with amazing food and absolutely beautiful surroundings.
We had emailed the wedding coordinator a week before our trip to reserve our date. When we arrived, on the second day of our trip we had ONE 20 minute meeting with her. She was incredibly nice and helpful. She asked a few basic questions about what flavour cake we wanted (which turned out delicious!), what I wanted my bouquet to look like, and what colour we wanted our runner to be. There were tons of gorgeous choices, and I got the Calia lilies I wanted!!! Also, she asked us to give her the names of the music we wanted for our ceremony. We hadn't considered this at ALL (yeah, we're clueless I know), but we went away for a bit and thought about it, and came back with a few pretty "alternative" and not typical wedding songs that we loved and were meaningful to us. The next day, she had them all ready and burned onto a CD to use at our wedding.
Did I mention that this was all free? Our wedding package, which included the ceremony, champagne, cake, flowers, decorations.... was free with the room that we booked for 7 nights. The only extra we had to pay for was photography, which turned out amazing. For $650 bucks we had our ceremony photographed and a photo shoot after on the beach. We got 120 prints in an album, and a CD containing 250 high quality digital negatives. I was over the moon with the results and the deal.
Anyways, on to pictures!!!
This is only a small sampling of the great photos we got. To see more, here's a link to the photo book I made through mypublisher.com. I should add here that mypublisher was incredible! Really easy to use, and the quality of the product is excellent. I highly recommend them to anyone thinking about making a book with your digital negatives.
Mypublisher book this way!!
Two weeks after we got back, we threw a party for our closest friends and immediate family at a really cool restaurant in our home town. I don't have pictures from that yet (it was just last weekend!) But when I get them I will update this post. The whole evening went off like a charm! I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. Although, I definitely got a little taste of the stress other brides must go through at their reception! We only had about 35 people there, and it was so difficult to balance spending time with everyone and doing things like, you know, eating! :P However, I was just pleased to see that everyone enjoyed themselves.
In the interest of other brides who might be considering doing something like this, I'll provide a basic budget breakdown:
Week at the resort: $4500 (all-inclusive with airfare- we got a great deal from redtag.ca)
Wedding Ceremony: $0
Photography: $650
"Reception" at home: $1000 (included dinner, desert, wine, and an open bar at our place afterwards)
I also spent $50 at Staples on DIY invitation kits: I designed announcements and invitations to our dinner, and printed them on my home computer. I think they turned out great. Picture of the announcement for reference:
To summarise, we ended up saving a TON of money, and avoided a lot of family drama as well. The week we spent at the resort was the most romantic and intimate time of my life. Our ceremony was gorgeous and exactly what both of us had envisioned. We were able to be completely open in our vows (which we wrote ourselves), and we both feel like we wouldn't have been able to be as honest and as revealing of our feelings as we were, if we had had family and friends around. Not that we have anything to hide, but there are some things that you only want that one person to hear, you know?
Anyways, all of this boils down to a big 'GO FOR IT!!!!!!!' to brides considering "eloping" or doing a destination wedding or whatever you want to call it. I am sosoSO happy, and feel like we had a wedding more beautiful than anything we could have had at home, for a fraction of the cost.
If you got through all that, congrats! :D Feel free to ask me any more questions you might have about this kind of wedding.
We were married at the Excellence Riviera Resort and Spa in Cancun, Mexico. It's 5 star and has won a ton of awards this year (we stayed for 8 days and 7 nights)... we spent MANY hours on tripadvisor picking the resort, and I have to say we made the right decision. It was insanely luxurious, with amazing food and absolutely beautiful surroundings.
We had emailed the wedding coordinator a week before our trip to reserve our date. When we arrived, on the second day of our trip we had ONE 20 minute meeting with her. She was incredibly nice and helpful. She asked a few basic questions about what flavour cake we wanted (which turned out delicious!), what I wanted my bouquet to look like, and what colour we wanted our runner to be. There were tons of gorgeous choices, and I got the Calia lilies I wanted!!! Also, she asked us to give her the names of the music we wanted for our ceremony. We hadn't considered this at ALL (yeah, we're clueless I know), but we went away for a bit and thought about it, and came back with a few pretty "alternative" and not typical wedding songs that we loved and were meaningful to us. The next day, she had them all ready and burned onto a CD to use at our wedding.
Did I mention that this was all free? Our wedding package, which included the ceremony, champagne, cake, flowers, decorations.... was free with the room that we booked for 7 nights. The only extra we had to pay for was photography, which turned out amazing. For $650 bucks we had our ceremony photographed and a photo shoot after on the beach. We got 120 prints in an album, and a CD containing 250 high quality digital negatives. I was over the moon with the results and the deal.
Anyways, on to pictures!!!
This is only a small sampling of the great photos we got. To see more, here's a link to the photo book I made through mypublisher.com. I should add here that mypublisher was incredible! Really easy to use, and the quality of the product is excellent. I highly recommend them to anyone thinking about making a book with your digital negatives.
Mypublisher book this way!!
Two weeks after we got back, we threw a party for our closest friends and immediate family at a really cool restaurant in our home town. I don't have pictures from that yet (it was just last weekend!) But when I get them I will update this post. The whole evening went off like a charm! I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. Although, I definitely got a little taste of the stress other brides must go through at their reception! We only had about 35 people there, and it was so difficult to balance spending time with everyone and doing things like, you know, eating! :P However, I was just pleased to see that everyone enjoyed themselves.
In the interest of other brides who might be considering doing something like this, I'll provide a basic budget breakdown:
Week at the resort: $4500 (all-inclusive with airfare- we got a great deal from redtag.ca)
Wedding Ceremony: $0
Photography: $650
"Reception" at home: $1000 (included dinner, desert, wine, and an open bar at our place afterwards)
I also spent $50 at Staples on DIY invitation kits: I designed announcements and invitations to our dinner, and printed them on my home computer. I think they turned out great. Picture of the announcement for reference:
To summarise, we ended up saving a TON of money, and avoided a lot of family drama as well. The week we spent at the resort was the most romantic and intimate time of my life. Our ceremony was gorgeous and exactly what both of us had envisioned. We were able to be completely open in our vows (which we wrote ourselves), and we both feel like we wouldn't have been able to be as honest and as revealing of our feelings as we were, if we had had family and friends around. Not that we have anything to hide, but there are some things that you only want that one person to hear, you know?
Anyways, all of this boils down to a big 'GO FOR IT!!!!!!!' to brides considering "eloping" or doing a destination wedding or whatever you want to call it. I am sosoSO happy, and feel like we had a wedding more beautiful than anything we could have had at home, for a fraction of the cost.
If you got through all that, congrats! :D Feel free to ask me any more questions you might have about this kind of wedding.